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A Russian-Language Daily Hits the Streets

Ewa Kern-JedrychowskaCopies of Reporter, a new free Russian-language daily, being handed out outside the Herald Square subway station on Tuesday.

Walking around Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, it’s hard to grasp that problems are roiling the newspaper business.

Newsstands are filled with publications in Russian. Some of them are monthlies, others weeklies, and they cater to various readers’ needs: Vecherniy New York covers many local and community stories; nationally distributed V Novom Svete focuses on world sensations; Russkaya Reklama serves as a kind of yellow pages with classified ads.

Yet in this newsprint supermarket of perhaps a few dozen outlets, there has been no daily newspaper for New York Russians since Novoye Russkoye Slovo, trying to cut production costs in the wake of competition from other Russian-language publications, went weekly in 2009, nearly a century after its founding in 1910. In December 2010, it ceased publishing altogether.

Reporter, a newspaper that started publishing on Monday, aims to fill the gap.

“Our potential readers are active people who have suffered without fresh news,” said Vladimir Chernomorsky, 64, executive editor at the paper.

Reporter (the word is the same in Russian as in English) is modeled after the free dailies handed out around subway stations, but will be distributed mainly in the areas where Russian speakers live and work. Felix Gorodetsky, the founder of the paper and its editor-in-chief, said that Reporter would in some ways resemble a Cyrillic version of amNewYork and that he hoped the model would prove sustainable. “There is a difference between amNewYork and The New York Times,” he said, adding that his paper “will be smaller and cheaper than Novoye Russkoye Slovo.”

Despite the paper’s tabloid format, Mr. Chernomorsky and Mr. Gorodetsky said they were determined to maintain a high level of reporting. Both are veteran journalists with years of experience in the former Soviet Union and at Russian-language publications in New York, including Novoye Russkoye Slovo, where they both worked.

The two may bicker over small details, but they joke that they have so much in common that with their balding heads and short beards they even look like brothers, although Mr. Gorodetsky, 55, is from Odessa in Ukraine, while Mr. Chernomorsky is from Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan.

While they represent the generation of older émigrés, they say they want the paper to reach out to younger readers, too. “We want to be a bridge between generations in the Russian community,” Mr. Chernomorsky said.

Vitaly Tsybenko, 21, a reporter at the paper whose energy and outspokenness contrasts with his colleagues’ concise style, will try to do just that.

“They don’t know what’s hip and what’s going on, what clubs are the best, what restaurants are upscale,” he said. “And we, the younger generation, can bring it to the newspaper.”

Reporter also wants to assume the explanatory role that other ethnic publications have. “The main aim of this newspaper is to integrate Russians into the American life,” Mr. Chernomorsky said, adding that the publication would cover various social and immigration issues as well as community news. Its goal also will be to keep its readers updated on the news from their home countries and in places where their relatives tend to live — Ukraine, Russia, Israel. It is starting with a daily press run of 10,000 copies.

For now the paper plans to rely heavily on freelancers. A small staff of seven works in the newsroom, in an inconspicuous building on Coney Island Avenue in Gravesend. They share it with Davidzon Radio, a popular Russian-language radio station they intend to collaborate with (both outlets are affiliated with Davidzon Media, Inc).

Meanwhile, Valery Weinberg, the owner of the currently dark Novoye Russkoye Slovo, said there were plans to bring it back “as a daily newspaper.”

Jehangir Khattak of the New York Community Media Alliance, a nonprofit group that advocates for ethnic newspapers, said that the dynamic situation in the Russian-language media market was proof of the strength of ethnic media. “There may be instances where some publications might be closing down,” he said. “But the other side is that this media sector is very dynamic and that’s why we see new publications coming up: because there is a need for that.”

According to the latest census estimates, about 200,000 New Yorkers over the age of 5 speak Russian at home. The Community Media Alliance says that in New York City there have been more than 350 publications, including 26 daily newspapers, published in languages other than English. Now, there is one more in stock.

This should be welcomed. The dynamic and growing Slavic community in New York has been mostly under the radar, while they have helped revitalize such world famous Brooklyn locales as Brighton, Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Greenpoint, and Sheepshead Bay. They are on the whole very hardworking, their children are eager students, and the overwhelming majority are eager to become part of the fabric and greatness of America. While their prescence has certainly, put a new spin on Premier K’s, old adage of we will bury you, our new comrades are cordially embraced. The only caveat is why didn’t our futurists predict this, so we could have been taught to read and speak Cyrillic and the tongue, back in the 1950’s, 1960’s, and early 70’s. Nonetheless, for us natives, we say, Picasa! Picasa! Picasa!, and Das va danya, everybody!

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